Customs’ New Wikipedia Test to Prove You Can Code

Celestine Omin. Andela

Celestine Omin fell in love with computers as a child in Nigeria. Each night, he’d visit a family friend and use his Windows XP machine until the wee hours. He soon grew restless and wanted his own machine, but could afford only a keyboard and mouse. They helped him to imagine typing on a virtual monitor.

Eventually, he bought a computer and set to work teaching himself how to code. His diligence landed him a programming job at a law firm in Calabar, Nigeria in 2010. Two years later, he became the first engineer at the e-commerce startup Konga. Today he works for the US firm Andela, which matches programmers in Nigeria with clients in the US.

Omin is, in other words, exactly the sort of highly skilled, hard working person you’d expect the United States to welcome. Instead, Omin says he was greeted with suspicion at JFK International Airport on February 26 when a customs official subjected him to a written test to prove his occupation. “He told me, ‘I don’t believe you are a software engineer,'” Omin says.

A spokesperson for the US Customs and Border Protection said he could not confirm or deny Omin’s allegations because the agency cannot comment on specific cases. But he said the agency does not administer written tests to verify anyone’s stated reason for traveling. Yet Australian programmer David Thornton told News.com.au that a customs officer at Newark Liberty International Airport subjected him to a computer science test as well.

These stories, if true, suggests that at least some customs officials engage in “extreme vetting” with or without Trump’s latest executive order. But the nation’s digital economy, education system, and healthcare system all depend on attracting the best people. Fostering an atmosphere of suspicion sends a strong message to the world’s most skilled and innovative people that they’re no longer welcome in the US. And ill-conceived questions could keep legitimate travelers in a variety of scientific and engineering fields out of the country.

Omin says the customs agent asked him how to balance a binary tree, and to explain an abstract class and why an engineer might need one. He says exhaustion and the stress of being interrogated made it difficult to answer the questions. But even under the best of circumstances, many engineers and programmers would find those questions challenging.

Balancing a binary tree is way of storing data. Most programmers use them, but few programmers ever need to create or balance their own. “I’ve been programming for over 30 years and am much more involved in the algorithmic details than the vast majority of programmers,” saysJeremy Howard, an Australian programmer and entrepreneur who has founded multiple startups and teaches an online course on artificial intelligence. “And I’ve never actually needed to balance a binary tree.”

More programmers would be familiar with abstract classes, a common feature of many popular programming languages. But not all programming languages use them, and programmers who don’t use them may not be able to explain them.

Omin suspects the customs agent simply searched Google for a few questions and had no knowledge of the subject, let alone the answers to his own questions. Thornton, the Australian stopped in Newark, said the customs agent asked him about the programming language Python. Experts call the idea that a test could ferret out imposters absurd. “Algorithm, puzzle, or riddle questions in technical interviews are just terrible, unless they directly pertain to the work that someone has to do,” says David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO of the software company Basecamp and creator of the programming framework Ruby on Rails. “It’s a completely unnatural environment to have someone answer programming questions on a whiteboard or on paper.”

Omin is not sure why the customs agency eventually let him into the country, but suspects it was because someone with the agency called his employer, who verified his employment. The next person subjected to an impromptu employment test may not be so lucky.